My Go Career

I started playing Go in the spring of 1986, when I was 15. I became
interested because there was a club at my high school run by a math
teacher named John Lee, and I didn't like that everyone there could
beat me. Once I was hooked, my father, who was around 3 kyu at the
time, started playing with me every weekend. We started at 23 (!)
stones, and worked our way down at about the rate of one stone per
week.

During this time I read all the go books I could get my hands on, and
(starting when I was around 12 kyu or so) spent all weekend every
weekend playing at the New York Go Club, which was then a little
upstairs room of the Keystone Restaurant, a greek diner at 2nd avenue
and 26th street. My first game at the NY Go club (like so many other
players') was with Mario. Spending all weekend every weekend playing
go was good for my game, but bad for my social life -- my girlfriend
got bored and dumped me.

One day in the summer, when I was around 8 kyu, Sakata Eio, honorary
Honinbo and one of the greatest players of the century, visited the
club. He was tired, said his translators, and only wanted to play one
game, with the youngest player in the club. At 15 years old, that was
me.

Wow. I played him on 7 stones (which was absurd, he could have easily
at 7 stones have crushed a shodan who in turn could have crushed me at
7 stones -- I tried to put down 9 but he kept sliding them off the
side star points until I got the idea). He tried his hardest to make
it close, but I stubborly forced more and more points on him in the
endgame and ended up losing by over 10. Me & that game ended up being
part of a series in Igo Club (a popular Japanese go magazine) called
something like "Go Geniuses of the World." As a big overgrown baby
8-kyu I was nothing like a go genius, but still, it was extremely
exciting and encouraging.

Anyway, I kept studying and playing, and I reached shodan about 9
months after I started playing, and was 3 dan by the time of the US Go
Congress in 1987.

At the `87 Go Congress, I met
Janice Kim,
then newly promoted professional shodan. She moved to New York,
and accepted me as her student. In the summer of `88, I was the
US representative to the Ing
World Youth Championship (Paris), and came in eighth (ahead of the
Europeans, behind the Asians :). I had the interesting experience of
being handed a consolation box of apricots by Chang-Hao,
before the game started. And also losing to Mok-jin Suk, a
little Korean boy who had to sit on folded up blankets to be able to
reach the far side of the go board. I met lots of nice people in
Paris, including a Maitre Lim, who wrote some words of wisdom (176k .gif) for me
in four languages.

In September of `88 I moved to Japan to study go in the house of Oeda
9-dan. By the time I got there, Michael Redmond had moved out, so it
was basically Ryu (now Tengen), Endo (now
3? dan), Kurotaki(now 4? dan), me (now 6 dan :), and Kato Ryo
(still Insei). At Oeda's house we
studied go, played go, gave go lessons to amateurs, and played ball
games in the park across the street. And played in the insei
tournament every weekend (except Ryu, who was alreay pro).

The best I ever did in the Insei league was to get promoted to B-class
just in time to get into the ichijijyo-sen, or semifinal professional
promotion tournament. My record in that tournament was something like
2 wins and 12 losses (and I was happy about it!). The top four
finishers in the ichijijyo-sen would join the final promotion
tournament along with the 12 players in A class, and the top couple of
finishers in that tournament would be promoted to professional. All
of which is to say, becoming professional is hard.

I finally quit trying to become a professional and returned to the US
in January of 1990. I came to realize in the end that there was a
vast gulf between my own mental state and the one I would need to
become a professional. A successful go student must sacrifice
everything for go, and (un)fortunately by the age of 18 I already had
some baggage I wasn't willing to part with.

On a more practical level, I realized that becoming professional is
not a Good Thing unless you are willing to live in Japan or Korea
forever: you give up about five years of your life and then you still
can't make a living if you move back to the West. Worst of all you
can't even play for fun any more!

So in 1990 I moved back to New York, and started school. I haven't
played much go since then. Eventually I'd like to start playing
seriously again, though catching up to John to win the
U.S. championship is going to take a little work...